Mmm, what an interesting week

I have been very busy here in Malaysia this week. On thursday, I was asked to do a MySQL University session on MMM. The preparation was very stressful. There was no good wifi to be found until literally a few hours before the session (Big thank you to Gurdip at APIIT for providing a space and exceptional help!). On top of that, dimdim, the software used by MySQL for their sessions doesn’t seem to want to work on Linux (particularly the speaker part). I ended up using a laptop borrowed from APIIT with Vista and IE. Feels kind of counter-intuitive for a company in the FOSS business.

But that wasn’t the end of the MMM-promotion week: I happened to be allowed to present at the foss.my conference in Kuala Lumpur pretty last minute. At first I was going to do an updated version of the talk I gave at Froscon in August, but I was asked to do a tutorial session of 3 hours. I had never done anything like that, but I am always up for a challenge

Again, preparation was a bit stressful. I didn’t know how many people to expect and it wasn’t clear if I would achieve getting running MMM clusters up in 3 hours. Well, I was underestimating my own capabilities apparently. Almost 100 people showed up, most of them without a laptop. I was surprised at that and explained them that it was probably not going to be so interesting for them. Again, I was wrong. While the laptop-owners prepared their laptops, I used my time to explain to everyone what MMM is, and how it works. Then we set up the laptops, solving all the problems we met on the beamer that we had a user connected to.

In the end we managed to set up 2 clusters within exactly 3 hours. Only 6 (almost 7) ‘servers’ participated in that end-result, for various reasons the rest was not possible. Still, it was a very good result and the attendees were visibly very happy.

If you hadn’t noticed yet, I’m a big fanboy for MMM and thinks this project needs/deserves a lot more visibility. It really solves a bunch of problems many MySQL admins struggle with, while providing a simple, cheap HA solution. This week has been very good for the promotion of MMM.

Along the way I also discovered that I really love doing this workshop and I hope to do many more like this. On that note: if you know of any conferences or meetings in the Asia Pacific area in the upcoming months, let me know and I’ll try to be there with either a presentation or a workshop!

5 thoughts on “Mmm, what an interesting week”

I suggest checking out the recording of the university session, it gives a good overview of how it works and what it can do for you.
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